Not Yet 1984 But Close

George Orwell’s novel warned of the excesses we are now seeing from Trump

In his celebrated novel “1984,” instead of alluding to a dark utopia in a remote future, George Orwell wrote of his own world, honing in on the terrible paths trodden by the totalitarian Nazi and communist regimes. The book did, however, contain one aspect that, instead of referring to the present, jumped forward to a future society in which we had already begun to live in the year that gave rise to the title of the book. This aspect is summed up on a poster in the Ministry of Truth, where the protagonist, Winston, worked. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Such were the slogans of The Party, and it is this deliberately misleading and overbearing misrepresentation — one that presents lies as truths and aims to deliberately confuse — that has brought this Orwell novel back into the spotlight at a time when Trump, Brexit and numerous populist styles of nationalism have all seen success. Such is its current popularity that it has become the No. 1 seller on Amazon.

It is clear these slogans could have come straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook or formed part of the brainwashing strategy used so well by the communist leaders of the time. However, what Orwell showed in “1984” is that this very same formula could also be used in other supposedly more open systems of governance, thanks to the new language brought to us by social media. A language that allows us to invent facts, such as the “alternative facts” talked about by Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway, facts that have nothing to do with reality but which are accepted as true by a large proportion of the population.

This is the point at which we currently find ourselves, and we must urgently come out fighting. It is vital that we forcefully criticize any and all types of manipulation, no matter how modern they may seem.